We recently connected with E.A. Midnight and have shared our conversation below.
Hi E.A., thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
The great gift of being a writer is that each new project you are working on becomes this spinning ball of light that you put so much time and energy into crafting, editing, curating, editing more, and eventually trying to find a home for in the world. It gives and it takes. But that act itself is incredible and the way the mind is this renewable resource that keeps refilling astounds me regularly.
The most meaningful project I’ve worked on is the manuscript I am currently (finishing) writing. It is an eco-fiction novel set in the rolling mountains of western North Carolina and tracks the trajectory of a massive flood. Through the course of the flood, the reader is buoyed alongside the experiences of the narrative’s three main characters: a woman who works in the college’s writing center, a graduate biology student studying an endangered mussel population, and the river itself. This work seeks to tell an intimate story of ecological change while contending with the catacombs of loss. The characters and reader must reconcile what we are taught is possible through science with the lengths to which reality can bend when processing the wide expanse of grief.
The reason this project feels so special to me is the way it’s extended beyond just what was generated in my mind. I think a lot of the time people imagine that writers just have a thought and then poof there is the story. Like a nice little package that arrives in your brain. But creative writing is, or at least is for me, so much more.
This project was inspired by my experiences during the 2004 floods in Asheville, NC from Hurricanes Frances and Ivan. My college campus was completely cut off from the outside world, without power or water or any way to leave, for several days. There is this memory that’s been spinning in my mind for nearly two decades: This moment where I pushed through a fire exit door, saw a puddle forming in the dent of the metal basin of the fire escape, washed my hands in the water, and sliced up my palms. The puddle was filled with glass because the night before someone had broken the door’s window and I just didn’t realize it. I stared at my reflection as blood pooled off my hands and stained the puddle. That moment, that flash of a moment really, would not leave me. Finally, a year or so ago, I felt I was ready to start writing about it. That was the small gap of light through which the first narrator’s story began to unfold.
As I wrote, the story flowed and flowed and flooded me, and a second character surfaced (the biology student). When I realized how important she was to the overall arc of the narrative, I knew I needed to know more about her. Being a social science major, this meant it was time to do research (something I love deeply). What began as a simple internet search about what lives in the rivers of western North Carolina grew to conversing with conservation biologists and ultimately led me to my first ever writing research adventure. On that trip, I snorkeled alongside the biologists I had come to think of as friends, learning about rivers, the wildlife within them, and the critical balance of ecosystems. Getting a glimpse into this field of study and the conservation movement helped this novel flourish into the best version of itself, a story that needs to be told. Ultimately this work is a way to contend with how we can learn from and move through the many layers of loss. Transformation is as painful as it is powerful, but once we are in it, we must choose between staying safely on the shore or trusting the current and diving in.
Realizing that I get to use my ability to write, to tell a story, to express an experience, and with that maybe help others shift the way they interact with the vast topics of mental illness, the natural world, environmentalism, and the future… Well, that is just amazing.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
While I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, it wasn’t until my first creative writing class in undergrad that I began to understand what writing could actually do, the ways that it could truly move the soul. My professor, Selah Saterstrom, opened a whole new world that I never considered before; how line breaks could make the reader pause, how to introduce musicality into the work, how to challenge the normal behaviors of what writing “should” look like. Having someone as insightful and brilliant as Selah opened up my mind to listening to what the work needs, to being a good conduit for the creative ether.
These days I would describe myself as an artist who specializes in multi-modal, cross-genre hybridities. What does that mean? Well, I tend to feel like genre is a made-up thing that boxes authors into a clean little spot in the bookstore. So, I do my best to let the work tell me what it needs to be and then create that. One of my manuscripts, INTERIOR, which I’m currently sending out to publishers, is a memoir told through free verse poetry, 35mm film photographs I’ve taken, and art that I’ve created. I find that as someone who requires many mediums to learn, telling the complex story of my mental illness/health journey cannot simply be done with words. I am hybrid, meaning I am made up of many, many things, and the work I create follows that same path.
While I began my higher-educational endeavors focusing on creative writing at Warren Wilson College, I eventually changed majors (and schools) and received my Bachelor of Arts degree in the field of Sociology from SUNY Binghamton University in 2008. Over the years I have worked in many varied fields, including government data collection and research, physical fitness and sports management, and information technologies. In 2017, I decided to pursue creative writing on an academic level once again. I received the Goddard/PEN North American Scholarship Award to attend Goddard College’s prestigious MFA program. There I received my Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing, with a focus on Hybrid Writing, Memoir, and Poetry, in 2019. I have been extraordinarily fortunate that my work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. I was the first-place winner of the HerStry 2023 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize. My writing can be found in Aurora Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, Inverted Syntax, tiny spoon literary magazine, Poetry Northwest, and other publications. I am also very excited to share that my poetry chapbook manuscript, mundane objects, will be published by dancing girl press in winter 2023.
My journey as a writer is a beautifully evolving one.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
The mission is simply to write what I know.
When I was writing and working on INTERIOR, I felt like I was pulling so much of me out of myself. It was the hardest thing I had done, going through some of my darkest memories and writing about them. Putting myself into the paper was often gutting. But I kept going because I knew that in each of the pieces there were these slivers that would align with someone else and that would help them feel less alone in their living or surviving. I kept telling myself that as hard as it was to write, it was harder to live it and I did that already. I survived, I keep surviving. That kept driving my work.
Most days, I write, even if for a moment, because I see stories everywhere. I feel lines coming through my skin before my brain knows what to do with them. The writing drives me forward because it helps me remember that I am alive and keeps me grateful for it.
The special mission driving me at my core is to keep honoring my soul’s vow to writing as an art form. I know that I will keep changing, that my voice will grow to look and sound different than it does now, and that is such a gift.
Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?
In 2016, I decided I wanted to get serious about my writing and I figured the best way to do that was through an MFA. I began the process of looking at schools/programs and reconnected with my undergrad mentor, Selah. Since I would need to be reading a lot in an MFA program, she suggested a handful of books to me. One of those books was Potted Meat by Steven Dunn. I was blown away by this novel. When I gushed about the book to Selah, she told me, “Steven is in Denver, you should reach out and tell him how his book moved you.” The idea of reaching out to an author seemed completely strange and not something I could do. But I did friend him on social media. And he friended me back.
When I applied to and got into the MFA program, I posted about the process a lot. Steven reached out because he was thinking of going to the same school I was applying to. We connected in real life, and despite my being so nervous to interact with an actual author whose work blew me away, we became friends. Through Steven I found a wonderful writing community and began to workshop my and other’s work. That experience profoundly changed how I encountered and related to literature. Listening to other incredible writers, learning from them, and growing my own sense of understanding laid a formidable foundation for my becoming the writer I am still evolving into. I learned a good deal in my MFA program, but it was my editing/writing group that changed my writing life.
So, I guess the stuff I really wish I knew before heading down this path would be:
1. While an MFA is necessary to teach on the college/graduate level, it is not necessary to write. Graduate school is very, Very expensive and paying off those loans can be stressful and emotionally taxing. I know not everyone is lucky enough to have a writing community, but I do think there are great places to start looking. Like this: https://www.pw.org/writers-groups. Also, go to readings in your community, reach out to authors whose books you adored, connect with local libraries and bookstores. Keep searching because you never know where you might find people you connect with and who will help you push your work and yourself.
2. There are lots of ways to learn outside of traditional MFA programs. I wish that I took more classes first to get a sense of what I really needed for my writing, rather than jumping straight back into traditional school. I have seen many stellar authors hosting workshops both online and in person, and that can be an incredible resource as well as community building. Also depending on what you might be looking for there are also residencies. Some have classes and others are just spaces with alone time to write. Here is a list by Electric Lit: https://electricliterature.com/19-writing-residencies-in-america-to-apply-to-in-2023/. Also, many national parks offer artist residencies, here are two links about that: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/air.htm and https://www.nationalparksartsfoundation.org.
3. Reading literature (especially new literature) is the KEY to everything. While I began reading more before starting down this path, I felt like I wasn’t sure what I wanted to read or where to look. These days there are comprehensive lists of genres and subgenres, and there are so many incredible voices rising up. The more you read, the more you will understand things about your own work and styles/topics you like. Following publishers on social media is also a great way to see what is coming out into the world. And, I can’t stress this one enough, reach out to authors whose work you love. It might go nowhere, but you might find friendships and community with those people. Many of my writer friends these days are folx I haven’t met in real life (yet!) but they fill my heart with joy every time I text with them. When it comes to literature to read (and actually this applies to submitting your work as well): Do some research, be curious, and keep looking.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.eamidnight.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/e.a.midnight/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-nicole-marshall-meistrich-a5190a80/
- Other: Editor, The Champagne Room Journal: https://www.thechampagneroomjournal.com/about Editorial Assistant, Inverted Syntax: https://www.invertedsyntax.com/ea-midnight-bio.html
Image Credits
E.A. Midnight R. M-M.